Stephen Gray

In memory of Sipho Sepamla (1932-2007)
The blues, the blues is yours in mine
Shot at in your BM I couldn't afford
Fought those publishers and censors who've preceded you
"I will say what needs to be said," and he did, direct
Fingerwagging in return their landwide curse
Brought your cherry off-time to my spare room
So cash I smuggled in to fix your bite
Italy we toured together reading freely
Though they would applaud without a real understanding
Black arts that yearned, never paid out
Unaccounted for, but you stayed you stayed
Filled in for an entire artless vile regime
Typing two fingers on manual: N O
Jigging out the poetry of SO WE TO
Oh, the blues, the blues is you in me
Never spelled out his memoirs, accepted
All their subvention instead, died holding on
Nor any of this rap clap trap and vogueish roll
Wrote real English verse, a hard harder school
The best of them, God rest your living soul
Oh, the black blues, the real black blues . . .
...

What piebald beauty, sloped like a hill!
So tall in front, three paces from the ground;
yet behind only one! Small head swivels.
Pretty sight! Never done harm to anyone.
...

Deeply etched is my life line, ditto
my head: meaning, comfortable, intelligent,
with the fork on the latter: destined
to employ hand writing. With my heart
line close to the fingers, I'll never be deceived.
Travel lines must be rubbed off, don't show,
but take the rascettes like suicide scars
under the wrist: extra criss-cross, sure longevity.
Now the mounts, where prominent, my Jupiter
signals leadership, my Mercury charm;
Mars means energy and Venus must be passion.
The slash across where I slipped protecting myself
is only temporary, leaves a small scar
across my dicey fortune. Enclose the pen now,
grip it tight. Write for your life.
...

With your pharaoh's crest, fine feathers
spattered in fertile mud, decurved beak;
favoured among Chosen People, I hear,
to carry messages of state from Africa
to King Solomon from Sheba your queen.
Never mind his wisdom, her spices and gold,
as the Bible states in I Kings.
We're talking secrets of big dealers
and how you pried in to read her last P.S.
Something you know, as you probe my lawn,
go "Hoop oop, shekel! Hoop oop, shekel!"
...

Sand scouring toes, follow tide,
Find blue mussel-shell, half,
Dig groove, let fill all
The way to the tanker wreck . . .
Now lift stone, crabless.
Behind rock crop, black herdboy:
Pees where no one watches,
Looking for cow
Looking for cow . . .
Retrieve mother, sunglasses
Reflect two of me:
Knitted woollen costume,
Carrot-topped, pink as
Boiled shrimps. Threatens
Camomile lotion. Build
Castle to defend us . . .
Black lad queries: don't
Let him in, earthworks!
Grins! Wishes to help construct.
But wave advances! Scarper . . .
See you next time.
...

I personally don't know anyone who has died of AIDS. I really honestly don't.
Thabo Mbeki
Dead already in their isolation,
Untouchable for their contagion,
The lepers gather in smasher and waistcoat
On parade, holding their mellow note:

Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war,
From ward to church, and repeat as before;
The drums they beat till their hands drop,
Tongues twist about when they have to stop.

Once their feet go, they may hobble,
Bones for crutches, ears in trouble:
O Sarie Marais is so ver van my hart,
At the poor cemetery they had to part.

Then their sons on harmonicas insist on more
And the bugler's boy's learning to read score;
From the church to their prison they swarm and go,
Blowing their guts out, fortissimo.

Most were kept from seeing a leper discompose,
Lesions, through the bridge of the nose;
In their colonies with a shot now cured,
Each Lazarus is raised, a miracle ensured.

Yet their wild stomp persists in the memory . . .
How the Governor flinched in his gloves and glory,
Taking the tribute he could barely endure:
From such deprivation, a melody so pure.
...

(after Juvenal, Satire X)
Consider glorious Hannibal: how more in the end did he weigh
than his raging body? The man whom all his continent
could not contain, from the Moorish sea to the hot Nile,
all Ethiopia and its elephants, he of the scorpion-strike.
Adds to his kingdom Spain, overleaps the Pyrenees,
leads his hundred thousand over the Alps of snow,
cleaving the very rock; to possess all Italy he swarms down.
"Nothing," he vows, "is done until my Carthage
bursts their gate to plant our standard there."
What a rich spectacle that one eyed-stoic general,
His kinky flaming hair - the African who conquered Rome!
Behind his back the base he as a boy, keen for carnage,
had meant to save, sixteen years before, is taken.
To shelter he flees in another's shade, a fretting exile -
the liberator of an empire, fallen into wounded age.
Once the world was stirred never to be the same again,
by Hannibal Barca, whom no sword but his own might pierce.
How vain are human wishes! He is mere flesh for a ransom!
Just so that we may declaim all his lost deeds,
sing his praise-song for ever, with no mention of his defeat.
...